Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  How could he, in good conscience, say no to the five hundred bucks? No was not a part of the deal. To be what she had learned to want to be (to be what he needed her to be), what she needed from Sabbath was yes. Never mind that she used the money to buy power tools for her son’s basement workshop. Matthew was married and a state trooper with the barracks down in the valley; Drenka adored him and, once he became a cop, worried about him all the time. He was not big and handsome with porcupinish black hair and a deep cleft in his chin like the father whose anglicized name he bore but much more patently Drenka’s offspring, short in stature—only five feet eight and 135 pounds, he’d been the smallest guy in his class at the police academy as well as the youngest—and at the center of his face a bit of a blur, the noseless nose a replica of hers. He had been groomed to one day be proprietor of the inn and had left his father desolated by quitting hotel management school after just a year to become a muscular, crew-cutted trooper with the big hat, the badge, and lots of power, the kid cop whose first assignment running radar with the traffic squad, driving the chase car up and down the main highways, was the greatest job in the world. You meet so many people, every car you stop is different, a different person, different circumstances, a different speed. . . . Drenka repeated to Sabbath everything Matthew Junior told her about life as a trooper, from the day he had entered the academy seven years earlier and the instructors there began to yell at them and he swore to his mother, “I’m not going to let this beat me,” until the day he graduated and, little as he was, they awarded him an excellence pin in physical fitness and told him and the classmates who had survived the twenty-four-week course, “You’re not God but you’re the next closest thing to him.” She described to Sabbath the virtues of Matthew’s fifteen-shot nine-millimeter pistol and how he carried it in his boot or at the back in his belt when he was off duty and how that terrified her. She was constantly afraid that he was going to be killed, especially when he was transferred from the traffic squad to the barracks and had to work the midnight shift every few weeks. Matthew himself came to love cruising in his car as much as he’d loved running radar. “Once you’re gone on your shift, you’re your own boss out there. Once you get into that car, you can do what you want out there. Freedom, Ma. Lots of freedom. Unless something happens, all you do is ride. Alone in the car, cruising, just driving the roads until they call you for something.” He’d grown up in what the state police called the North Patrol. Knew the area, all the roads, the woods, knew the businesses in the towns and found an enormous manly satisfaction in driving by at night and checking them out, checking out the banks, checking out the bars, watching the people leaving the bars to see how bad off they were. Matthew had a front seat, he told his mother, at the greatest show on earth—accidents, burglaries, domestic disputes, suicides. Most people never see a suicide victim, but a girl whom Matthew had gone to school with had blown her head off in the woods, sat under an oak tree and blew out her brains, and Matthew, in his first year out of the academy, was the cop on the scene to call the medical examiner and wait for him to come. In that first year, Matthew told his mother, he was so pumped up, felt so invincible, he believed he could stop bullets with his teeth. Matthew walks in on a domestic dispute where both of the people are drunk and screaming at each other and hating each other and throwing punches and he, her son, talks to them and calms them down so that by the time he leaves everything is okay and neither of them has to be pinched for breach of peace. And sometimes they’re so bad he does pinch ’em, handcuffs the woman and handcuffs the man, and then waits for another trooper to come, and they take the couple in before they kill each other. When a kid was showing a gun in a pizza place on 63, flashing it around before leaving, it was Matthew who found the car the kid was driving and, without any backup, knowing the kid had a gun, told him over the loudspeaker to come out with his hands in the air and had his own gun drawn right on the guy . . . and these stories, establishing for his mother that Matthew was a good cop who wanted to do a good job, to do it as he’d been taught to do it, frightened her so that she bought a scanner, a little box with an antenna and a crystal that monitored the police signals on Matthew’s frequency, and sometimes when he was on the midnight shift and she couldn’t sleep, she would turn on the scanner and listen to it all night long. The scanner would pick up the signal every time Matthew was called, so that Drenka knew more or less where he was and where he was going and that he was still alive. When she heard his number—415B—boom, she was awake. But so was Matthew’s father—and enraged to be reminded yet again that the son he had been training every summer in the kitchen, the heir to the business he had built from nothing as a penniless immigrant, was now an expert in karate and judo instead, out at three in the morning stupidly trailing an old pickup truck that was going suspiciously slowly crossing Battle Mountain. The bitterness between father and son had grown so bad that it was only with Sabbath that Drenka could share her fears about Matthew’s safety and recount her pride in the amount of motor vehicle activity he was able to produce in a week: “It’s out there,” he told her. “There’s always something—speeding, stop signs, taillights out, all kind of violations. . . .” To Sabbath, then, it came as no surprise when Drenka admitted that with the five hundred dollars he had paid her to complete the trio with Christa and himself she had bought, for Matthew’s birthday, a portable Makita table saw and a nice set of dado blades.

  All in all, things couldn’t have worked out better for everyone. Drenka had found the means by which to be her husband’s dearest friend. The one-time puppet master of the Indecent Theater of Manhattan made more than merely tolerable for her the routines of marriage that previously had almost killed her—now she cherished those deadly routines for the counterweight they provided her recklessness. Far from seething with disgust for her unimaginative husband, she had never been more appreciative of Matija’s stolidity.

  Five hundred was cheap for all that everyone was getting in the way of solace and satisfaction, and so, however much it disturbed him to fork over those stiff, new banknotes, Sabbath displayed toward Drenka the same sangfroid that she affected as, lightly enjoying the movie cliché, she folded the bills in half and deposited them into her bra, down between the breasts whose soft fullness had never ceased to captivate him. It was supposed to be otherwise, with the musculature everywhere losing its firmness, but even where her skin had gone papery at the low point of her neckline, even that palm-size diamond of minutely crosshatched flesh intensified not merely her enduring allure but his tender feeling for her as well. He was now six short years from seventy: what had him grasping at the broadening buttocks as though the tattooist Time had ornamented neither of them with its comical festoonery was his knowing inescapably that the game was just about over.

  Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother. Her primacy was nearly as absolute as it had been in their first incomparable decade together. Sabbath felt something close to veneration for that natural sense of a destiny she’d enjoyed and, too—in a woman with as physical a life as a horse’s—for the soul embedded in all that vibrating energy, a soul as unmistakably present as the odorous cakes baking in the oven after school. Emotions were stirred up in him that he had not felt since he was eight and nine years old and she had found the delight of delights in mothering her two boys. Yes, it had been the apex of her life, raising Morty and Mickey. How her memory, her meaning, expanded in Sabbath when he recalled the alacrity with which she had prepared each spring for Passover, all the work of packing away the year-round dishes, two sets of them, and then lugging in their cartons, f
rom the garage, the glass Passover dishes, washing them, shelving them—in less than a day, between the time he and Morty left for school in the morning and they returned in midafternoon, she’d emptied the pantry of chumitz and cleansed and scoured the kitchen in accordance with every last holiday prescription. Hard to determine from the way she tackled her tasks whether it was she who was serving necessity or necessity that was serving her. A slight woman with a large nose and curly dark hair, she hopped and darted to and fro like a bird in a berry bush, trilling and twittering a series of notes as liquidly bright as a cardinal’s song, a tune she exuded no less naturally than she dusted, ironed, mended, polished, and sewed. Folding things, straightening things, arranging things, stacking things, packing things, sorting things, opening things, separating things, bundling things—her agile fingers never stopped nor did the whistling ever cease, all throughout his childhood. That was how content she was, immersed in everything that had to be done to keep her husband’s accounts in order, to live peaceably alongside her elderly mother-in-law, to manage the daily needs of the two boys, to see to it, during even the worst of the Depression, that however little money the butter-and-egg business yielded, the budget she devised did not impinge on their happy development and that, for instance, everything handed down from Morty to Mickey, which was nearly everything Mickey wore, was impeccably patched, freshly aired, spotlessly clean. Her husband proudly proclaimed to his customers that his wife had eyes in the back of her head and two pairs of hands.

  Then Morty went off to the war and it all changed. Always they had done everything as a family. They had never been separated. They were never so poor that they would rent out the house in the summer and, like half the neighbors living as close to the beach as the Sabbaths did, move in back to a shitty little apartment over the garage, but they were still a poor family by American standards and none of them had ever gone anywhere. But then Morty was gone and for the first time in his life Mickey slept alone in their room. Once they went up to see Morty when he was training in Oswego, New York. For six months he trained in Atlantic City and they drove to see him there on Sundays. And when he was in pilot school in North Carolina, they took the drive all the way down south, even though his father had to turn the truck over to a neighbor he paid to run deliveries the days they were gone. Morty had bad skin and wasn’t particularly handsome, he wasn’t great in school—a B-C student in everything but shop and gym—he had never had much success with girls, and yet everybody knew that with his physical strength and his strong character he would be able to take care of himself, whatever difficulties life presented. He played clarinet in a dance band in high school. He was a track star. A terrific swimmer. He helped his father with the business. He helped his mother in the house. He was great with his hands, but then, they all were: the delicacy of his powerful father candling the eggs, the fastidious dexterity of his mother ordering the house—the Sabbath digital artfulness that Mickey, too, would one day exhibit to the world. All their freedom was in their hands. Morty could repair plumbing, electrical appliances, anything. Give it to Morty, his mother used to say, Morty’ll fix it. And she did not exaggerate when she said that he was the kindest older brother in the world. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps at eighteen, a kid just out of Asbury High, rather than wait to be drafted. He went in at eighteen and he was dead at twenty. Shot down over the Philippines December 12, 1944.

  For nearly a year Sabbath’s mother wouldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t. Never again was she spoken of as a woman with eyes in the back of her head. She acted at times as though she didn’t even have eyes in the front of her head, and, as far as the surviving son could still recall while panting and gulping as though to drain Drenka dry, she was never again heard to whistle her signature song. Now the seaside cottage was silent when he walked up the sandy alleyway after school, and he could not tell till he got inside if she was even in the house. No honey cake, no date and nut bread, no cupcakes, nothing ever again baking in the oven after school. When the weather turned nice, she sat on the boardwalk bench overlooking the beach to which she used to rush out with the boys at dawn to buy flounder off the fishing boats at half what it cost in the store. After the war, when everybody came home, she went there to talk to Mort. As the decades passed, she talked to him more rather than less, until in the nursing home in Long Branch where Sabbath had to put her at ninety she talked to Morty alone. She had no idea who Sabbath was when he drove the four and a half hours to visit her during the last two years of her life. The living son she ceased to recognize. But that had begun as long ago as 1944.

  And now Sabbath talked to her. And this he had not expected. To his father, who had never deserted Mickey however much Morty’s death had broken him too, who primitively stood by Mickey no matter how incomprehensible to him his boy’s life became when he went to sea after high school or began to perform with puppets on the streets of New York, to his late father, a simple, uneducated man, who, unlike his wife had been born on the other side and had come to America all on his own at thirteen and who, within seven years, had earned enough money to send for his parents and his two younger brothers, Sabbath had never uttered a word since the retired butter-and-egg man died in his sleep, at the age of eighty-one, fourteen years earlier. Never had he felt the shadow of his father’s presence hovering nearby. This was not only because his father had always been the least talkative one in the family but because no evidence had ever been offered Sabbath to persuade him that the dead were anything other than dead. To talk to them, admittedly, was to indulge in the most defensible of irrational human activities, but to Sabbath it was alien just the same. Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.

  Yet precisely this he now did daily. His mother was there every day and he was talking to her and she was communing with him. Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere? Would you look like yourself if I had the means to see you? The picture I have keeps shifting. Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is “knowing” no longer an issue? What’s the story? Are you still so miserably sad? That would be the best news of all—that you are your whistling old self again because Morty’s with you. Is he? Is Dad? And if there’s you three, why not God too? Or is an incorporeal existence just like everything else, in the nature of things, and God no more necessary there than he is here? Or don’t you inquire any further about being dead than you did about being alive? Is being dead just something you do the way you ran the house?

  Eerie, incomprehensible, ridiculous, the visitation was nonetheless real: no matter how he explained it to himself he could not make his mother go away. He knew she was there in the same way he knew when he was in the sun or in the shade. There was something too natural about his perceiving her for the perception to evaporate before his mocking resistance. She didn’t just show up when he was in despair, it didn’t happen only in the middle of the night when he awoke in dire need of a substitute for everything disappearing—his mother was up in the woods, up at the Grotto with him and Drenka, hovering above their half-clad bodies like that helicopter. Maybe the helicopter had been his mother. His dead mother was with him, watching him, everywhere encircling him. His mother had been loosed on him. She had returned to take him to his death.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Fuck others and the affair is over.

  He asked her why.

  “Because I want you to.”

  “That won’t do.”

  “Won’t it?” said Drenka tearfully. “It would if you loved me.”

  “Yes, love is slavery?”

  “You are the man of my life! Not Matija—you! Either I am your woman, your only woman, or this all has to be over!”

  It was the week before Memorial Day, a luminous May afternoon, and up in the woods a high wind was blowing sprigs of new leaves off the great trees and the sweet scent o
f everything flowering and sprouting and shooting up reminded him of Sciarappa’s Barber Shop in Bradley, where Morty took him for his haircuts when he was a small kid and where they brought their clothes to be fixed by Sciarappa’s wife. Nothing was merely itself any longer; it all reminded him of something long gone or of everything that was going. Mentally he addressed his mother. “Smell the smells, can you? Does the out-of-doors register in any way? Is being dead even worse than heading there? Or is it Mrs. Balich that’s the awfulness? Or don’t the trivialities bother you now one way or the other?”

  Either he was sitting in his dead mother’s lap or she was sitting in his. Perhaps she was snaking in through his nose along with the scent of the mountain in bloom, wafting through him as oxygen. Encircling him and embodied within him.

  “And just when did you decide this? What has happened to bring this on? You are not yourself, Drenka.”

  “I am. This is myself. Tell me you will be faithful to me. Please tell me that that’s what you will do!”